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“We were just leaving,” I muttered, slipping back into my heels.

Jay’s attention trailed over to me, his gaze sweeping up and down my body with approval. “No need. I like an audience.”

The nameless woman swatted him on the arm. “Don’t be gross.”

Reed placed his hand on my lower back. This time, I hid my flinch and bit back the hiss.

“C’mon.” He dropped his hand and walked ahead.

Jay waggled his eyebrows at me, ogling my legs as I swept past him with a quick apology. And as Reed came to a halt halfway down the hall, I almost slammed into him as I reached for the wall to maintain my balance.

He spun around to face me.

We were an inch apart. He towered over me by half a foot, his proximity wrapping me up in a tight hug. My heartbeats jackknifed, the fever between us far from snuffed out.

“Did you want to get out of here?” he asked, low and dark. “Go back to my place.”

The invitation shot tiny firecrackers between my ribs. Between my legs.

Pop, pop, pop.

Explosions, colors, and shimmery heat.

Instinct had me clenching my thighs, my mind reeling with implication. With images of continuing what we’d started in his warm bed, tangled in sweat-slick sheets.

“Yes,” I said on a quick breath. No hesitation.

Reed’s eyes were glazed and heated as his focus dipped to my thoroughly kissed lips. He swallowed. “Let me grab my jacket. I’ll meet you in the living room.”

“Okay.”

It was a shame he had to grab his jacket.

I think a part of me would never understand why he’d brought a jacket in the first place, considering it was the dead of summer in northern Illinois and even nightfall came with eighty-degree temperatures.

But he just had to grab the damn jacket.

And the moment he stalked back over to me waiting for him in the center of the living room with a wildly racing heart, everything imploded in my face.

“Halley Foster? What the hell are you doing here?” barked a pitchy, shrill voice. “You’re only seventeen years old. Christ, honey. Your daddy’s gonna blow a gasket if he hears you were here.”

Marnie LaRue…my neighbor.

Time froze.

My chest seized, heart buckled.

A slow-motion haze swirled around me as I tilted my head and found Reed’s eyes as he stood at the base of the hallway.

He was staring at me.

Stopped dead in his tracks, his leather jacket slung over one shoulder and the Oasis CD gripped tightly in his opposite hand.

For a split second, he looked expressionless.

Numb.

Processing.